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Abstract

The heat and matter transfer during glucose catabolism in living systems and their relation with entropy production are a challenging subject of the classical thermodynamics applied to biology. In this respect, an analogy between mechanics and thermodynamics has been performed via the definition of the entropy density acceleration expressed by the time derivative of the rate of entropy density and related to heat and matter transfer in minimum living systems. Cells are regarded as open thermodynamic systems that exchange heat and matter resulting from irreversible processes with the intercellular environment. Prigogine’s minimum energy dissipation principle is reformulated using the notion of entropy density acceleration applied to glucose catabolism. It is shown that, for out-of-equilibrium states, the calculated entropy density acceleration for a single cell is finite and negative and approaches as a function of time a zero value at global thermodynamic equilibrium for heat and matter transfer independently of the cell type and the metabolic pathway. These results could be important for a deeper understanding of entropy generation and its correlation with heat transfer in cell biology with special regard to glucose catabolism representing the prototype of irreversible reactions and a crucial metabolic pathway in stem cells and cancer stem cells.
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